As part of a study to verify the behaviors and body cognitions involved under conditions where people adopt avatar bodies and go beyond just their natural body, a research team comprising Professor Maki Sugimoto of the Keio University Faculty of Science and Technology, Reiji Miura (master's student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology), collaborated with Shunichi Kasahara (researcher) of the Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. / the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo, Professor Michiteru Kitazaki of Toyohashi University of Technology Graduate School of Engineering, and Professor Masahiko Inami and Adrien Verhulst (researcher) at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo; specifically, the group tested behavior and body cognition under conditions in which the bodies, movement, and vision of multiple (2 or 4 bodies) avatars in a virtual environment were synchronized as representations of the physical bodies of the experiment participants. It was shown that under conditions where multiple avatar bodies had been synchronized (4 bodies), a certain degree of sense of agency and body ownership could be obtained simultaneously for the multiple avatars representing the physical body.
The outcomes of this research were presented at the international conference Augmented Humans 2021 (AHs2021), which was held between February 22 and 24, and won the Best Paper Award. The papers of AHs were published on ACM Digital Library recently.